The Mabee-Simpson Library on the Lyon College campus has two new laptop computers installed with educational software and voice recognition software to serve students and community members with physical and learning disabilities.

The educational software is a comprehensive reading, writing and learning software solution for struggling readers, including individuals with learning difficulties such as dyslexia, attention deficit disorder or those who are English language learners.

The speech recognition software assures that the manual aspect of typing or impaired vision do not hinder a person's ability to write.

The college purchased the equipment with $8,300 provided to Lyon through the AT&T Excelerator competitive technology grant program.

Since 2002, the AT&T Excelerator program has provided more than 2,500 technology grants –  totaling more than $47.8 million – to organizations across the country. In 2007, 12 regional and local nonprofit organizations in Arkansas benefited from the competitive program.